This week was big for building and pulling everything together. At the beginning of the week we finalized the design plan and started working on bringing the cart and gantry together. I measured and drilled the attachment points, and attached the gantry to the cart. Later in the week, I also added the drive motors to the cart and hooked them up to the wheels. I then created the Arduino code that would allow us to drive the cart over USB serial communication from the Pi. At the end of the week I worked with Ethan on trying to improve our software pipeline. A lot of the focus was on increasing the accuracy and simplicity of the g-code output.
We are currently on schedule. All of the motor control is complete, and we just finished the structure and are now moving to the final integration. Though next week is short, I plan on fixing any issues in the structure and finalizing the software pipeline.
I had to learn a lot about new software and packages that I hadn’t seen before. For the software, like UGS, I relied mostly on quick-start tutorials and forum posts from people using the same software. Most of the software tasks we needed to complete relied on libraries and packages that I had never seen before, and many were small API ports that had limited use. For these, I had to focus mostly on the provided documentation for the package or the original software.